Kawanami-Breu Sebastian

Sebastian Kawanami-Breu investigates how technological models work as material embodiments and exosomatic conditions of human knowledge, augmenting, and in some sense also prefiguring our conceptual grasp of the world. He is a research associate and PhD candidate at the Department of Musicology and Media Studies, Humboldt University Berlin, and curator of the Signallabor, a research space for creative and hands-on approaches, currently focusing on the role of AI in science and contemporary cultural industries.

His PhD project lies at the intersection of historical epistemology, media theory and the philosophy of technology. It examines the agency of neural networks as epistemic things in the history of Cybernetics and the Life Sciences. Kawanami-Breu is the author of "Phenomenotechnics and Noumenology", an article on the philosophy of Gaston Bachelard. His writings on historical and political questions of media technology have appeared in Bloomsbury's "Thinking Media" series, Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, as well as the journal Gendai Shisō (現代思想).

Ongoing interdisciplinary work includes a project on Future Archeologies of Urban Modeling with the Berlin-based architecture collective C/O now, and a project on the media history of Vector Models in collaboration with HUMLAB, Umeå University. Kawanami-Breu is also known for his work as a dramaturge in the Performing Arts, and for his co-translation of “Capitalist Realism” and other works by the late Mark Fisher.